by Terry Miles
Emily pulled a pack of cigarettes from beneath the visor and took her hands off the wheel to light one up. Without a word from her sister, Annie reached across my lap and grabbed the steering wheel.
Emily and Annie were in perfect sync.
Annie steered for her sister, staring ahead at the road, keeping the truck between the lines with the focus of a brain surgeon or air traffic controller, as if driving between those lines was the only thing keeping the world spinning.
We drove for another seven minutes or so before Emily took the wheel and turned onto an old logging road. A minute later, she pulled over onto the unpaved shoulder.
“There’s nothing up here but the Peterman house,” I said, “but there might be some kids at the gravel pits.”
If I showed up at the gravel pits with Emily and Annie Connors, I’d be a hero tomorrow at school.
Emily shushed me as she turned on the cabin light and pulled a small journal from her purse.
“You sure this is the road?” Annie asked. “K’s right; it’s just the Petermans’ up there.”
Emily stared down at the journal in her lap.
The pages were completely covered in tiny words, numbers, and sketches. It looked familiar to me—not the content, but the style. It was similar to the things my friends and I would scribble onto graph paper while playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Emily circled some numbers she’d written above what appeared to be a collection of names and symbols. She thought about something for a moment, then she added the numbers together, leaned back, and exhaled.
“A hundred and seven point three,” she announced. I was silent. Watching Emily Connors do math was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen in my life.
She put the journal away and turned to me, her expression grave. “You can’t tell anybody about what’s going to happen tonight.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“I’m serious.” She grabbed my wrist, hard. “You have to promise.”
“I won’t tell anybody.” But Emily’s eyes indicated that she needed more. “I won’t, I promise. I swear.” I held up my pinkie. Emily ignored my pinkie and stared into my eyes for what felt like forever. Then, seemingly satisfied with whatever she’d found there, she double-checked the information in her journal and slid it back into her purse.
Annie popped out the Tori Amos cassette. “What’s the number again?”
“One-oh-seven point three,” Emily answered.
“Got it.” Annie slowly tuned the dial to that number. There was nothing but static. “Are you sure this is it?”
“I hope so.” Emily adjusted the volume on the radio, then turned to the two of us and smiled.
It was beautiful and unnerving.
In my experience, Emily Connors wasn’t the kind of girl who smiled.
“Time?” Emily asked Annie, suddenly all business.
“Six minutes after ten,” Annie replied.
Emily touched my arm and said, “Whatever you do, don’t freak out, okay?”
I did my best to look cool as Emily put the truck into drive and guided us back out onto the old logging road.
We’d been listening to the static from the radio for about a minute or so when Emily nodded to her sister, then pressed the lever that turned off the truck’s headlights.
Black.
We were driving at the same speed, but now I couldn’t see a thing.
We were completely blind.
Static from the radio filled the cab.
“Emily, I don’t think—”
“Sshhh.” Emily grabbed my arm again, hard enough that she actually left four bruises, one from each finger. “Listen.”
I shut up and listened.
“Did you hear a voice?” Emily asked.
Annie shrugged. Clearly, she hadn’t heard anything. Emily looked at me and I just shook my head.
I was trying, but I found it hard to focus due to the constant static and the situation. Sitting in a truck with Emily and Annie Connors, speeding along an old logging road in complete and total darkness, wasn’t standard operating procedure for me.
“What was that?” Emily turned up the radio. “Please tell me you heard that.”
“I think so,” I lied.
I still hadn’t heard anything except for a steady stream of noise. My head was aching. The static from the radio tickled my ears and a thick fuzzy hum began vibrating, moving upward from somewhere deep inside my chest. My mouth was suddenly extremely dry.
I’d always attributed that sick feeling to the fact that we were speeding down that country road completely blind, but when I think back to that time now, I’m not sure that was it. Something felt…off in that moment. Different, somehow.
“Maybe we should turn on the lights?” Annie sounded scared.
“We’re fine,” Emily said.
When she’d switched off the headlights, the road was straight as far as the eye could see, but we’d been driving for quite a while since then. I crossed my fingers and hoped that we weren’t about to hit a curve.
“I don’t know, Em…” Annie said.
“Sshhh,” Emily said to her sister. “It says we have to drive in the dark.”
An almost imperceptible amount of moonlight occasionally revealed a bit of the road or the trees. I chose to believe Emily was using that light to keep us safely on the road.
“There.” Emily leaned forward. “Did you hear that?”
I did hear something, almost imperceptible at first, but it was there.
A woman’s voice.
Just as I was about to ask Emily if she’d heard the same thing, a loud buzzing filled the inside of the truck. Emily yanked the lever, the headlights flooded the road ahead of us, Annie screamed, and the world exploded in a brilliant flash of light and glass.
* * *
—
When Emily had turned the headlights back on, they’d cut like two tiny nuclear blasts through the darkness, illuminating a giant bull elk in the middle of the road.
The accident was over before my mind had time to process what was happening.
Emily and I were thrown clear through the windshield, but Annie remained inside the truck.
We were told later that, due to the position of her neck at the time of the accident, Annie had died instantly, and that there was no way she could have suffered.
I had a dislocated shoulder, a serious concussion, and a bunch of cuts and bruises, but I was lucky. Emily’s right leg had been badly injured. She spent almost a year in the hospital, and longer than that in physical therapy.
* * *
—
The last time I saw Emily Connors was a few years after the accident.
My parents and I were driving down to San Francisco to visit some family friends. On our way out of Washington, we pulled over so I could use a gas station restroom. I was walking back to the car when I saw her.
She was sitting in the back seat of the car next to ours. I smiled and waved, but Emily just kept staring straight ahead, looking right through me as if I didn’t exist. I was about to knock on the window to get her attention, but there was something about the way she was staring. I had the very distinct feeling she was someplace else, someplace far away, and that a knock on the window wouldn’t be able to reach her. Before I had a chance to change my mind and knock, the car she was sitting in pulled away and exited onto the freeway.
That night I had a dream about Emily and Annie Connors.
* * *
—
I dreamt that we were back on the road that led up to the Petermans’ house, but this time it wasn’t a bull elk standing in the middle of the road. This time, it was a tall twisted gray figure.
As we moved closer I could see that the gray figure was actually made up of much smaller things, broke
n swirling shapes that wiggled and blurred together to form the shape that was standing in the middle of the road.
I wanted to scream but I was frozen, unable to move or speak.
At that point, just like it had happened in the truck, the static from the radio filled every part of my mind, my head began to ache, and my mouth dried up. The gray thing in the middle of the road slowly started to turn.
I tried to close my eyes, but I couldn’t.
Emily was still driving, looking ahead as if the road were clear, and Annie had her head down, trying to hear the message Emily had been convinced was hidden somewhere in the static.
At this point, everything slowed down.
The buzz and static from the radio became deafening, and I felt the strange hum complete some kind of horrible circuit in my mind and body.
The truck continued speeding forward, and just as we were about to slam into the gray figure, I finally saw its face—or, at least, the place where a face should have been.
There was nothing but dark empty space.
This is when I heard the woman’s voice—the same sound I’d heard cut through the radio static that night in the truck.
In a voice like dry, sharp crackling fire, she said the words—the exact same words I’d heard her say on that road back in 1999.
She said, “The door is open.”
NOTES ON THE GAME:
MISSIVE BY HAZEL
(AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)
Gaming disorder is defined by the World Health Organization as “a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control…to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.”
Negative consequences are real.
Don’t forget to hydrate, and remember to tell somebody where you’re going when you leave the house to follow a strange clue that nobody else believes is a clue.
Be careful out there.
—HAZEL 8
3
IF YOU LISTEN CAREFULLY, YOU CAN TOTALLY HEAR THE RHUBARB
There were three hundred and ninety-five white tiles on the floor and four hundred black. It took me twenty-one steps to get to the booth.
Two professional sports teams of some kind were playing celebrity dodgeball on the small television that hung above the milkshake machine. There was a neon green Dodge Challenger visible outside on the street.
Dodge.
Alan Scarpio smiled and waved his fork in the air. “Can you believe this place?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty great.”
“I got you coffee,” he said, nodding to an off-white ceramic cup sitting on the table in front of me.
“Thanks.” I slid into the worn vinyl booth.
It was an old diner from the 1950s, located directly across the street from the Magician’s arcade. It was exactly the kind of place you might hear referred to as a joint or a greasy spoon. There were tiny jukeboxes on the tables in each of the booths. I think a few of them actually still worked.
I couldn’t believe I was sitting across from Alan Scarpio—one of the richest men in the world—watching him devour a piece of rhubarb pie.
Dodgeball.
Was that woman in the back of the diner wearing an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap? Groups of tiles on the wall—four, fifteen, seven, five—numbers corresponding to the letters in the word “Dodge.”
I was nervous.
As a kid, whenever I felt anxious, I found myself unable to stop picking out patterns—often to the point that I became incapable of focusing my attention on anything else. As these bouts of anxiety became more intense and frequent, I was forced to develop certain coping mechanisms in order to deal with the stress. The majority of these involved repeating familiar patterns from memory. The most effective involved tennis.
I’ve always loved tennis. I can recall entire matches with remarkable clarity. I’m able to do the same thing with baseball games and horror movie dialogue, but when it came to my homemade brand of pattern-recall therapy, tennis was always the most effective. One of my favorite matches was the 2001 U.S. Open quarterfinals match between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. On my legs, I would tap once for each player—Sampras on my left knee, Agassi on my right. I visualized every single shot, every serve and point, and eventually whatever was making me anxious would lose its potency and I’d be able to relax.
This technique had been extremely helpful after the accident with Annie and Emily Connors, and later when my parents were killed in a ferry accident while on vacation in Greece.
In the years following my parents’ death, I would go on to develop a number of deep-breathing and relaxation techniques that were effective in combating my anxiety. Those exercises, along with medical advances in anti-anxiety medication, eventually allowed me to stop tapping out tennis matches on my legs entirely.
I was almost two full sets into that U.S. Open match before I realized what I’d been doing. I yanked my hands away from my knees and took a sip of coffee.
It had been at least ten years since I’d tapped out a tennis match.
Fuck. Why was I so anxious?
Scarpio was reportedly fifty-six years old, but looked at least a decade younger. He was about five foot ten and thin, with scruffy brown hair, cool blue eyes, and a wide mischievous smile. He wore dark blue jeans, faded brown desert boots, and a white Oxford button-up shirt. He was Caucasian, with a barely perceptible accent—most likely English, or maybe Welsh.
“Did you know rhubarb grows so fast you can actually hear it?”
“Really?” I said. I had no idea.
“It’s true. I have a recording on my phone if you’re interested.”
“Oh…cool.”
“I’m just fucking with you.” He went back to eating his pie. “I mean, it’s true. Rhubarb does grow fast, and I do have a recording of it on my phone, but what the fuck do you care? You wanna know why we’re here, why I showed up at the arcade, and, more importantly, why I asked you for help.” He smiled. “Am I right?”
“You’re right—although the rhubarb thing is interesting.”
Alan Scarpio nodded. “You’re lying, but that’s okay.” He was using his fork to hunt down every crumb on his plate. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything? This pie is fucking fantastic.”
“I’m good, thanks.” I took a sip of the warmish coffee.
“Well, I’m stuffed,” he said as he leaned back in his chair and exhaled, every bit of pie now off the plate and inside the enigmatic billionaire.
I sat there in silence for as long as I could stand it.
“So,” I said, finally, “why did you show up at the arcade?”
“You’re surprised.”
“Very.”
“I get it. I’m a face you’ve seen on television or online. I saw Gary Busey once in a bar. He looked so familiar. As I walked by I smiled at him like the two of us were old friends.”
“He’s the crazy conspiracy guy?”
“I suppose maybe he is, but he was in Point Break. Classic. Two meatball subs!” Scarpio held up two fingers and yelled loud enough for the entire diner to hear. “Get me two, Utah!”
“I don’t remember that scene,” I said as the server approached our table and glared at Scarpio as if he were a small child who had just spilled a milkshake on the floor.
“Is everything all right?” She looked tired. The whites of her wide grayish-green eyes were spidered with tiny red lines, and her voice carried the earned rasp of somebody who’d poured an infinite amount of coffee into the cups of an infinite number of assholes. It had to be close to the end of her shift. She desperately wanted everything to be all right.
“Everything is perfect. I’m sorry for the outburst. We don’t actually want meatball subs. I promise i
t won’t happen again.” Scarpio smiled.
“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t have the energy to throw anybody else out tonight.” She smiled, added a tired wink, then topped up my coffee.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, clearly happy we weren’t going to ruin her night.
She didn’t appear to recognize Alan Scarpio. Maybe she’d look him up tomorrow when she came in for her shift and discovered she’d been given a three-hundred-dollar tip on a seven-dollar check.
Scarpio waited for her to leave, then pulled out his phone and set it on the table. “What do you know about Rabbits?”
I glanced down at his phone. I thought maybe he was recording our conversation for some reason, but I couldn’t see any voice recorder app, just the date, time, and a cute dog as wallpaper—some kind of spaniel with a light blue bandana around its neck.
“Well, I mean, I know what most people interested in the game know,” I said, trying to work out the best way to answer.
“Which is what?”
I had no idea what Scarpio was fishing for here. If he was Californiac, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration of the game, he knew a lot more than I did. And if he wasn’t Californiac, well, he was still a billionaire, and if he wanted to learn about Rabbits, all he had to do was hire an expert. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know quite a bit. Among my friends and the handful of Rabbits aficionados I know, I am considered something of an authority on the game. But Alan Scarpio could afford the best—or, at the very least, somebody a fuckload better than a perpetually underemployed gamer who’d spent the last few minutes frantically tapping out a decades-old tennis match.
“You’re not worried about the warnings surrounding the game? ‘You play, you never tell?’ ” Scarpio asked, repeating a section of the Prescott Competition Manifesto that I’d played earlier in the arcade.
“Of course not,” I said, although, like anyone seriously interested in the game, I’d heard rumors about all kinds of dangerous things surrounding Rabbits, including the mysterious Wardens—potentially deadly figures whose job it was to protect and maintain the integrity of the game at all costs.